At lunch with Marta Baiocchi: what language do cells speak – Barbara Bonomi Romagnoli

A quick glance and a laugh, with Marta Baiocchi we recognize each other like this, on the sidewalk at the corner of via dei Reti and via dei Piceni, in the San Lorenzo district of Rome, where the tavern Tram Tram has set up tables outside. The warm season has arrived, eating outdoors is very pleasant, even if the conversation is sometimes dominated by the noise of the historic tram 19, which goes from the center to Centocelle.

Marta Baiocchi is from Rome and works not far away, at the Higher Institute of Health (Iss) in the department of oncology and molecular medicine. However, you are keen to clarify that the opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the positions of the ISS. You have been studying cell biology for more than thirty years: “I observe the development and differentiation of cells”, she explains. “I started studying blood stem cells in the nineties, then I worked on the HIV virus and lately I have been dealing with cancer cells.” After an experience in the United States, Baiocchi returned to her hometown and for some years coordinated the ISS cancer stem cell bank “where we developed an innovative method to study and find new therapeutic approaches for diseases oncological. In cancer, cancer stem cells that reproduce are often resistant to chemotherapy treatments, so it would be very important to find new specific drugs “.

There is no doubt, he stresses, that prevention is fundamental: “I’m not a doctor, so I don’t have precise data on the number of sick people and healings, but I can tell you that in recent years in our laboratories we have had difficulty finding tumor fragments large colon to study: surgeons say the Lazio region’s screening program is working so well that most patients with very small tumors are now arriving at the hospital. When this happens, it means that public health is working, it means thinking about the community and not just about individuals. But it also means, for example, that instead of concentrating only on the search for a drug for breast cancer, which could be optimal only for some patients, maybe you could plan a mammogram for all of them in advance ”. The question is rhetorical but it reflects Baiocchi’s pragmatic approach, which also takes into account the limits of science: “As a biologist, the complexity of the cellular system is clear to me, which often makes it very difficult to explain the phenomena that are observed. It is known that eating in a certain way or walking helps to reduce cholesterol, but we do not always understand what happens from the point of view of the functioning of the cell ”. He explains it to me with a metaphor: “Imagine a cell as a city with railways, shops, high and low buildings, bicycles, traffic lights … you look at this city and you don’t even know all the genes well, because the genome project has mapped them all, but many do not know what they do. Here, imagine that every component of this city that you have removed cholesterol – the buildings, the traffic lights, the streets – is a little different than before. It is difficult to understand what the most important changes were, if the parameters have all changed a bit. We proceed by hypothesis, with a lot of patience and many hours in the laboratory “.

She is a sunny and very talkative woman, with a shrewd air in her jokes,
comments on the excellent creamed cod and resumes the story: “The human cell is certainly different from the plant one, but they have common archetypes, because life originated from a single cell, a bacterium that grew differentiated giving life to organisms different “. She wears a beautiful black and white necklace that resembles the DNA chain. I ask her where this passion for science comes from: “As a child I was passionate about literature, but I had a chemical father who taught me the meaning of nature, numbers and measurements from an early age. I chose biology because I thought I would have done a more concrete job ”.

She grew up in the seventies, in high school: “I was not a militant, but I absorbed the cultural climate of the time”, she says. “I shared a lot of themes, but on some gender issues I was a bit incredulous. Today I reproach myself for having understood its importance and gravity late. When I arrived at the university my faculty was full of women, I didn’t notice who knows what discrimination. Then a few years passed and I opened my eyes and saw that, although there were fewer in number, in our field the managers and heads of departments were, and are, almost all male. Colleagues on average spend competitions years before peers. Then you understand that there is something wrong: it is the glass roof that until you raise your arm you do not see and feel it “.

After all, he continues tasting the tartare, “science reflects the culture of the time, it is no coincidence that for a long time gender studies have been little dealt with by research, to investigate the differences between the sexes. Now the philosophical tension has changed, and consequently also the interest in the links between health, research and the democratic functioning of our societies “.

What can be, I ask, the role of disclosure in this exchange between science and society? “In the scientific world there has always been a debate on how much, if and how to disclose. Not because there is secret research in academic research, as it can sometimes be in pharmaceutical companies, but because there is a fear that there is no public capable of receiving that information in the right way. For example, distorted news has often been spread about animal experimentation, with the result that in Italy laboratories have been closed where all controls were certain and guaranteed, and now those researches are done in countries where you know nothing of what is happening, and animal welfare is almost certainly less protected. It is a pity, because the academic scientific community has always been open to discussion and for decades there have been very dense international exchanges, both regarding information and about the personnel who do research and to evaluate and publish our works “.

She pauses to smoke her pipe, or rather takes out two to be sure she always has one dry and laughs: “I always wander, let’s go back to your questions”.

Time is not much anymore, I ask you for a joke starting from your books whose titles already say a lot: Cento micron (Minimum Fax 2012) and In utero (Sonzogno 2018), a novel and an essay, both on assisted fertilization. “In the novel I hypothesized a uterus in the tub, but of all the possible changes that we will surely see on the maternity front, the canned uterus is definitely the most remote”, explains Baiocchi with a look that turns elsewhere for a few seconds, as if he were lost behind other thoughts.

“In the interaction between uterus and embryo there are thousands of different molecules that talk to each other and we don’t know everything they say. After in vitro fertilization, the embryo must be transferred to the uterus within a few days, otherwise that cellular dialogue is lost and degenerates. The woman’s body is therefore still needed. However, I am convinced that science and technology are a fundamental lever for the real change of society, for this reason, as a biologist I am in favor, for example, of the freezing of eggs in the young age, which would allow women to have children at an early age. more advanced without having to resort to egg donation. If it were free for all women it would be a solution that would increase their choice, and would also be more ethically sustainable ”.

“But what if we seriously considered the possibility of our extinction?” I ask. “Who can tell?”, She concludes. “We cannot predict it but we know that there have been moments in the history of this planet when human populations were reduced to a few thousand specimens, yet now we have grown exponentially: who knows, let’s see what happens”.